From the Introduction This is a book about death written by a lusty sixty-year-old man who had reason to fear that his own death was imminent. It is also a loving account of his return to those heroic days when he was young and learning about life in the bull rings of Spain.In the summer of 1952Lifemagazine headquarters in Tokyo dispatched a courier to the front lines in Korea with an intoxicating message. After prowling the mountainous terrain along which desultory action was taking place, he found me at a forward post with a small detachment of Marines.''Lifeis engaged in a tremendous venture,'' he told me in conspiratorial whispers. ''We're going to devote an entire issue to one manuscript. And what makes the attempt so daring, it's fiction.''''By who?''''Ernest Hemingway.''The name exploded in the cavelike foxhole with such force, such imagery, that I was instantly hooked. I had always admired Hemingway, considered him our best writer and certainly the man who had set free the English sentence and the crisp vocabulary. As I wandered about the world I constantly met foreign writers who went out of their way to assure me that whereas they considered themselves as good as Hemingway, they did not want to mimic him. They had their own style and were satisfied with it. And I began to wonder why they never said: ''I don't want to write like Faulkner...'' -- or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe, or Sartre, or Camus. It was always Hemingway they didn't want to copy, which made me suspect that that's precisely what the lot of them were doing.If you had asked me the day before that meeting with theLifeman I'd have said: ''I admire Hemingway immensely. He gave us all a new challenge. But of course I don't want to write like him.''The emissary continued: ''With so much riding on this experimentLifecan't afford to take chances.''''On Hemingway? How could you lose?''''Apparently you haven't been following the scoreboard. The critics murdered his last offering.''''Across the River and Into the Trees?It wasn'

From the Introduction This is a book about death written by a lusty sixty-year-old man who had reason to fear that his own death was imminent. It is also a loving account of his return to those heroic days when he was young and learning about life in the bull rings of Spain.In the summer of 1952Lifemagazine headquarters in Tokyo dispatched a courier to the front lines in Korea with an intoxicating message. After prowling the mountainous terrain along which desultory action was taking place, he found me at a forward post with a small detachment of Marines.''Lifeis engaged in a tremendous venture,'' he told me in conspiratorial whispers. ''We're going to devote an entire issue to one manuscript. And what makes the attempt so daring, it's fiction.''''By who?''''Ernest Hemingway.''The name exploded in the cavelike foxhole with such force, such imagery, that I was instantly hooked. I had always admired Hemingway, considered him our best writer and certainly the man who had set free the English sentence and the crisp vocabulary. As I wandered about the world I constantly met foreign writers who went out of their way to assure me that whereas they considered themselves as good as Hemingway, they did not want to mimic him. They had their own style and were satisfied with it. And I began to wonder why they never said: ''I don't want to write like Faulkner...'' -- or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe, or Sartre, or Camus. It was always Hemingway they didn't want to copy, which made me suspect that that's precisely what the lot of them were doing.If you had asked me the day before that meeting with theLifeman I'd have said: ''I admire Hemingway immensely. He gave us all a new challenge. But of course I don't want to write like him.''The emissary continued: ''With so much riding on this experimentLifecan't afford to take chances.''''On Hemingway? How could you lose?''''Apparently you haven't been following the scoreboard. The critics murdered his last offering.''''Across the River and Into the Trees?It wasn'